The latest record by Sam Amidon may be named after one of several Salt Rivers in the US, but the title also captures how hard he can be to classify. His music draws deeply from traditional folk, country, and blues, especially Appalachiana, but it’s too refined to be mistaken for them. It takes in pop reworkings—Mariah Carey and Tim McGraw and Tears for Fears—but it’s too understated and eccentric to be pop. Not quite a river, not quite the sea, it’s something in between, where Amidon swims around as if trying to find the point where one changes into the other.
On Salt River, his lifeguards are Philippe Melanson and Sam Gendel. Melanson is a patient, expressive percussionist who plays like someone touching water in different places, then studying the interlocking ripples. Gendel is a jazz saxophonist and producer whose airy intricacies were made for Amidon’s impressionistic songs. And Amidon himself is a nimble picker and fiddler of strings. But above all, there’s that doleful voice, that tattered perfection, with its detached warmth and aloof allure. It has the brass and grit you might hear ringing through a mountain hollow, yet the shine has been rubbed down to matte, the cadences dismantled for study, refitted for the great indoors. It’s what sets Amidon apart from the run of well-turned Nonesuch-core, where “low” traditions such as country and folk are dignified for concert halls with “high” ones like minimalism and jazz, now often goosed with indie rock: Harry Smith meets Tony Conrad in the neighborhood of Bon Iver.
This itself is a kind of tradition, and Amidon comes by it honestly. His parents were members of a radical puppet theater that sang on a Nonesuch album of early American folk hymns, and he would later release music on the label himself. Growing up in Vermont, he recorded and performed prodigiously throughout high school and then dabbled in the arty side of indie rock with lifelong collaborator Thomas Bartlett. But since then, he’s mainly staked his name on interpreting rather than creating songs, making himself a vessel that old things can swing through so sweetly and strangely they might as well be new.
On Salt River, “Three Five”—exhuming a morbid hymn called “The Old Churchyard”—has everything you’d want in an ideal Sam Amidon song: new-age–adjacent nylon strings flickering darkly and wetly, horns glowing softly as fireflies, percussion that laps and splashes, and Amidon deceptively straining for each interval, missing by strategic degrees. The other big moment is probably “Big Sky,” where he seems to have endeavored to cover Lou Reed’s garage-rock singalong as if he were Arthur Russell. Very nice but perhaps a novelty.
The contrasts within the songs are more interesting than those between style and source. “Cusseta” is a bleary, cozy, waking-up porch session refracting into an impossible minimalist grid. “Never” begins as a lonesome ballad and ends as a lonesome dance, and the great instrumental “Tavern” has a twist in the middle where the rustic nightclub dreamed in the first half melts into quasi-orchestral ambience. “I’m on My Journey Home” is part acoustic desert rock, part Medeski, Martin & Wood-style fusion jam. Not quite a river, not quite the sea.
The album has a few comparatively dry spots. The Appalachian ballad “Golden Willow Tree” is haunting in this sparse, piano-drizzled account but less dynamic than Jake Xerxes Fussell’s, and to me it doesn’t change enough to sustain its length. “Ask the Elephant,” seemingly a children’s poem, is a cute but odd piece of work I’m not sure what to make of. And a nonchalant version of Ornette Coleman’s “Friends and Neighbors” misses the original’s liberatory passion. But overall, this is another fine example of Amidon’s capacious, bracingly simple definition of the genre yoked to him. A song escapes from its author and starts to change, and this is folk—whatever a person happens to like, whatever people sing.
